Most causes of back pain don't require immediate medical attention, but you should see a doctor right away if your pain is accompanied by any of these "red flags": • Weakness or pain in your legs, especially if it goes all the way down to your feet. • Loss of bladder or bowel control. • Fever or tenderness. The first two could be a sign of neurological damage, caused by compression of the nerve roots at the lower end of the spinal cord. A fever or tenderness may signal an infection.

A historic slowdown in U.S. healthcare spending in recent years may be drawing to a close. An industry report published Tuesday and healthcare experts point to a steady rise in medical care being sought by consumers seeing specialists, getting more prescriptions filled and visiting the hospital. Other factors such as millions of newly insured Americans seeking treatment for the first time and higher prices from healthcare consolidation could also help drive up costs. Experts aren't predicting an immediate return to double-digit increases in medical spending.

Re your letters (June 14) on Canada vs. U.S. medical care: The American Medical Assn. has been telling us we wouldn't receive quality medical care if we had socialized medicine. More important, they say, we couldn't choose our own doctor. Well, I recently called a physician listed in the Yellow Pages of the telephone book under cardiology and internal medicine in the hope of establishing a patient-doctor relationship closer to my home. He had been recommended by a friend. The woman answering the call asked me one question: "Who is your insurance carrier?"

April 3, 2014 | By Aoun Sahi, This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf escaped a bombing early Thursday morning as he was being transferred by convoy from a hospital to his farmhouse in the Islamabad suburbs, police officials said. The bomb went off at about 2 a.m. local time along the route that the convoy was due to travel -- about 20 minutes before Musharraf reached the area, officials said. The convoy was rerouted following the blast, in which no one was injured, according to police. [Updated, 7:25 a.m. PDT April 4: A spokeswoman for Musharraf later offered a different account, telling reporters that the bomb went off after the former president had reached his home.

JOHANNESBURG -- South Africans heaved a sigh of relief as their beloved anti-apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela, was sent home from the hospital. The office of President Jacob Zuma said Mandela would continue to get medical treatment at his home in the upscale northern Johannesburg suburb of Houghton. Before his release late Wednesday, Mandela, 94, had been hospitalized for almost three weeks after being flown from his rural home in Qunu, Eastern Cape, to a Pretoria private hospital on Dec. 8. He was seriously ill with a lung infection and later had surgery to remove gallstones.

Lawmakers on Thursday sharply criticized a federal program that relies on private insurance companies to provide medical care and benefits to civilians injured while working in support of the U.S. military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members of a House subcommittee charged that the insurance firms had exploited the taxpayer-supported program to reap enormous profits while shortchanging workers. "We've got to straighten out this mess and we're going to do that," said Rep. Elijah E.

A woman arrives at the hospital with a condition called pulmonary hypertension. The arteries supplying her lungs are unable to deliver enough blood, which threatens their ability to delivery oxygen throughout her body. Making matters worse, she is 11 weeks pregnant, which puts additional strain on her weakened body. If the pregnancy continues, the woman surely will die. This was the situation confronting doctors last November at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.

Though the Great Recession took a much larger toll on African Americans and Latinos than on whites, members of all three groups were forced to cut back on medical services as a result of the economic downturn, research shows. Karoline Mertensen and Jie Chen of the University of Maryland's Department of Health Services Administration wondered whether the recession was having a disproportionate effect on minorities. After all, they noted, by 2009 the unemployment rate among African Americans was 14.8% and 12.1% for Latinos, while remaining at a relatively low 8.7% for whites.

Re "Getting the treatment at County-USC," Opinion, Feb. 14 Three cheers to Ben Ehrenreich (and four cheers to his girlfriend) for talking about what most don't: that the broken healthcare system can't simply be boiled down to jobs and dollars, or failed policies or individual incompetence. That, instead, the fallout of society's inability to grapple with and solve its most basic inequalities will then return to be revisited upon that society's members who are least able to insulate themselves from its daily indignities.

SAFED, Israel - The 9-year-old Syrian boy with no legs wheeled himself down a bright hospital corridor, stopping to accept a pain pill from one nurse and a high-five from another. He has been here for a month, ever since a Syrian government warplane flew low over his village and dropped a bomb that killed two of his cousins and blew apart his lower limbs. Both legs had been amputated by an overworked doctor in an improvised clinic in a cellar. The next day, the boy's grandmother took him and several other injured family members to the Golan Heights border half an hour away and asked the Israeli soldiers on the other side for help.

A crushing medical bill can cause money problems not just for a cash-strapped patient but for his or her entire family. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show more than one in four U.S. families recently experienced a financial burden due to the cost of medical care. Among Americans who participated in the National Health Interview Survey in 2012, 8.9% said they were currently having problems paying a medical bill and another 7.6% said they had been in that situation sometime in the previous 12 months.

WASHINGTON - Soaring healthcare spending - which helped pave the way for President Obama's health law - continued to moderate in 2012, the fourth year of a historic slowdown in how much the nation pays for medical treatment, according to a new government report. Overall spending on healthcare rose less than 4% in 2012, less than half the rate of a decade ago, independent economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concluded. And for only the third time in the last 15 years, health spending rose more slowly than the overall economy.

Re "The gap in medical education," Opinion, Jan. 3 I would like to commend Rahul Rekhi's advocacy for incorporating health policy in medical education. In addition to focusing on healthcare systems and health economics, there is a critical need to focus on the impact of health policy on the underlying causes of disease. For example, medical care alone cannot address the obesity epidemic underlying the increasing prevalence of diabetes. Policies such as how we plan our communities, how much physical activity is provided in schools and how we promote nutritious food consumption have a great impact on the health of our communities.

January 5, 2014 | By George P. Shultz, Scott W. Atlas and John F. Cogan

As the acute problems of the Affordable Care Act become increasingly apparent, it also has become clear that we need new ways of ensuring access to healthcare for all Americans. We should begin with an examination of health insurance. Insurance is about protecting against risk. In the health arena, the risk at issue is of large and unexpected medical expenses. The proper role of health insurance should be to finance necessary and expensive medical services without the patient incurring devastating financial consequences.

Among the many stents, surgical clamps, pumps and other medical devices that have recently come before the Food and Drug Administration for clearance, none has excited the widespread hopes of physicians and researchers like a machine called the Illumina MiSeqDx. This compact DNA sequencer has the potential to change the way doctors care for patients by making personalized medicine a reality, experts say. "It's about time," said Michael Snyder, director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine.

Los Angeles police were searching Sunday for a 55-year-old man who walked away from a board and care home despite needing medical treatment, authorities said. Michael Rodriguez has been missing since about 11:30 a.m. Saturday, when he left the home in the 1000 block of Leighton Avenue in South Los Angeles, the police said. Rodriguez is 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighs about 200 pounds and has black hair and brown eyes, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. He was wearing a gray and navy blue shirt, a gray sweat shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes, officers said.

The Transportation Security Administration agent who was killed at Los Angeles International Airport died within two to five minutes of being shot, coroner's officials said. Gerardo I. Hernandez, a 39-year-old father of two, was shot multiple times, according to a one-page statement released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County coroner's office. A final autopsy report is expected to be released Friday. Hernandez became the first TSA officer killed in the line of duty when a gunman opened fire at the airport the morning of Nov. 1. Three others were wounded before the suspect - identified as Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23 - was shot in a gun battle with airport police and taken into custody.